Integrative Psychiatry & Psychotherapy, Hypnotherapy

I come from a large family of healers. It was my grandmother’s medical intuition that prevented a life threatening event from taking my life as an infant. I learned from my first years of life that a place exists for all of us where the health and healing of our body, mind and spirit will be nurtured, respected and compassionately guided.

I learned more about these places as I volunteered at a nursing home as a teenager. I found that knowing the cause of a person’s infirmity and illness was less critical than activating their self-healing capacity. I witnessed not only the body which was debilitated but the mind and spirit of these wise elders. I believed that had they received a better emphasis on preventing disease and treatment that was specific to the person, they may have lived there later years with greater health and vitality, freer from the mental anguish I saw so many suffer with.

That’s when I decided to become a nurse and meet people where they are, joining them on the road to health and wellness, working with them to develop an integrated plan of care that addresses their needs as mental, spiritual, and physical beings.

Undertaking graduate studies in Health Promotion and working for McGill University’s Health Care System with it’s multicultural community gave me first hand experience of combining western medicine with the eastern traditions that my patients wanted integrated. When I returned to the US, this training was refined as I was hired by the Nation’s first fully integrated Wellness Center where I worked alongside practitioners of 18 alternative modalities and taught medical and doctoral nursing students how to combine treatments from conventional medicine with complementary alternative medicine for which there was evidence of safety and effectiveness. We worked closely with the National Institute of Health to present the ever mounting evidence of clinical efficacy that was being demonstrated.

As a board certified Nurse Practitioner I am able to prescribe medications when necessary and my services are reimbursable by most insurance company’s. I’ve studied both family medicine and psychiatry because the two are so often linked. For the past 10 years I’ve had my holistically oriented Integrative Psychiatry practice, integrating Western medical and psychological treatments with various healing approaches that I have studied over the past 25 years. My grandmother had told me that “there’s a reason you’re here, a purpose to your life”, and that purpose for me has distilled down to helping you, the individual, be well and reach your full potential. I am grateful to be able to do The work I have chosen, which I am passionate and which has become a such a rewarding lifelong endeavor.